Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  For some former cult members, discovering or rediscovering the world of feelings is a big part of the healing process. The Role of Emotions in Our LivesFeelings are a necessary part of our humanity, and they're vital to our survival. Without feelings there would be no enjoyment and no sense of accomplishment. We would be unable to proceed with the business of living and would be in danger of perishing as a species. Feelings can be divided into four basic groups (this is a bit oversimplified, but is handy for our discussion). The four basic feeling groups are sad, bad, glad, and mad. These are primary feelings, like the primary colors red, blue, and yellow. All other colors are combinations of primary colors, and most feel ings are combinations of the primary feelings. Each primary feeling can be further differentiated or combined with other feelings. For example, to feel bad may include feelings of guilt, rejection, or abandonment. Gladness can encompass joy, happiness, love, gratefulness, and a whole spectrum of pleasurable feelings. It is also quite normal for people to have conflicting feelings. This is known as ambivalence. A former cult member's graduation from college provides an illustration: tears of happiness and sadness flow as Sukie W. relishes her achievements and the obvious pleasure of her family. But Sukie also feels a degree of sadness at not graduating until her thirties, after having spent more than ten years in a cult. Feelings combine and recombine, and they also come and go. Anyone who has tried to "hold onto happiness" knows that emotional states are as elusive as the breeze. Forcing yourself to feel something, whether good or bad, is hard work. You can recall a feeling by thinking about things connected to the desired emotion: for example, remembering a moment when you felt moved to tears may revive those feelings. Recalling a time of great rage or fear may again bring up intense feelings. Yet trying to force yourself into or out of a feeling state is counterproductive; generally it's best to let your emotions come and go naturally. The Role of Emotions in CultsFeelings are central to us. They are integral to how we experience life and evaluate our experiences, and they influence the decisions and choices we make. Working in concert with intelligence and free will, feelings serve as signals that point us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and survival. Considering how powerful emotions are, and how basic they are to survival and happiness, it is not surprising that they can be used to control people. Controlling someone's emo - tions means controlling that person. Cultic groups and abusive relationships manipulate emotions in order to influence and control people, retrain them, and ultimately further the cult's or leader's goals. Cult members are taught to distrust their feelings-to suppress certain emotions and foster others. Guilt, shame, and fear are all used to engender compliance and obedience. Many other feelings are punished, suppressed, or forbidden. What happens to these bottled-up emotions?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Doesn’t that mean I am supposed to be happy in my own marriage? Isn’t that how it works?” I pause and wonder if I should state the obvious. “It sounds like you felt inferior, maybe even unworthy compared to your mother.” Naomi looks intrigued, as if my words force her to recalculate everything. I continue: “While our parents’ relationship can serve as a model for our romantic life, it is usually our relationship with them that we repeat in later intimate relationships.” Naomi seems startled and I’m worried that maybe I have just put into words the forbidden—that which was known but not allowed to be spoken. “Unworthy,” she repeats my word. “I remember that when I was about ten years old I told my mother that I didn’t believe they loved me the way they loved each other.” Naomi sighs and continues. “My mother got so upset. She said that I shouldn’t talk like that, that of course they loved me, and that one day I’d grow up and have a love exactly like theirs.” Naomi stops and looks at me. “But I never did,” she says. “Sam loves me, but he has never loved me the way he loved Isabella. She was his first love.” Naomi tries to hold back her tears. She doesn’t want to cry but she can’t help it. “I hope you know how much I love Isabella,” she says. “I feel devastated. I feel awful to compare the two of us right now, when she is so sick.” Isabella is fighting for her life while Naomi is trying to figure out her life. Isabella’s illness forces Naomi to face the excruciating limitations of our existence: that nothing is all good or lasts forever, that we are all flawed and vulnerable, and that bad things happen to everyone, even those we idealize. Before she leaves, Naomi asks to meet me again tomorrow, and we schedule a session to follow her breakfast with Isabella. Naomi leaves and my heart is heavy. THE NEXT DAY Naomi comes in and immediately throws herself on my couch. Her eyes are red. She doesn’t speak and just sighs. The news is bad. “It was brutal,” Naomi finally says. “Isabella is dying.” She bursts into tears. So many questions are running through my head, but I keep silent. “Isabella gave me packages with things to give each of her four children after her death,” Naomi whispers. “That was her secret. She didn’t want anyone to know about those packages.” “How heartbreaking,” I say, and Naomi tells me about the packages. “It all started when Isabella read about a woman who, when she learned she was going to die, prepared several years’ worth of dinners for her family.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  Loss of MeaningIn cults, the love of God or higher ideals, the desire for self-improvement, or the wish to help humankind and society are twisted and used to influence, control, or exploit devoted believers. For example, followers may be skillfully manipulated into believing they have had genuine spiritual or psychic experiences, or that they have found the truth, the one path to freedom, or salvation. Frequently, it is difficult to determine which experiences were real and which were orchestrated by the cult. Sometimes when devotees learn that their cherished experiences were based on deception or manipulation, they begin to doubt their very core. When they learn, for example, that they devoted their time, money, and skills to support a corrupt leader, they feel burned, betrayed, and unwilling to believe again in anything. For many, the capacity to trust that special part of themselves-the altruistic, loving, and optimistic core-is shattered, sometimes forever. This part is often the last to heal. Redefining beliefs, values, and spirituality or personal philosophy is a process that takes time and determination. Some former members resume their precult beliefs or return to the religion or worldview of their upbringing, while others develop a deep cynicism and distrust for any belief system whatsoever. Those who do not take the time to educate themselves about cults and social-psychological influences (or persuasion techniques) remain vulnerable to ever-present recruiters and scam artists of all types, and, in the end, may wander from group to group, looking for the right path to fulfill their spiritual or philosophical needs. This issue of beliefs is central to cult involvement and postcult recovery. (See Chapter 11 for further discussion.) Loss of FamilyThe loss of family and loved ones can be a double whammy. Cult members may lose their precult family and friends, as well as the family and friendships they developed in the cult. Reconnecting with people who were outside the cult is not always possible, though most former members make efforts to do so. Sometimes too much water has gone under the bridge, and the other person has no desire to reestablish the relationship. Old friends may have relocated, are too far away, or cannot be found; certain important people or relatives may have died. For long-term cult members estranged from their families, the loss of the opportunity to reconcile-or say goodbye to a loved one-can be remarkably painful. Those who stay in a group for any length of time usually come to regard their fellow members as family. Often the isolation of cult life engenders that kind of bonding. Mutual suffering (and the forced sharing of private thoughts that some cults require of their members) tends to establish and reinforce illusions of intimacy and closeness. For those who were born or raised in a cult, or married into one, various relatives may still be devoted members. For them, leaving the group can mean losing relatives, friends, and all relational ties.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  From a very young age, my siblings and I learned to recognize what wasn’t acceptable to talk about. We never asked about death. We tried not to mention sex, and it was better not to be too sad, too angry or disappointed, and absolutely not too loud. My parents didn’t burden us with unhappiness, and they believed in optimism. When they described their childhoods, they were painted in beautiful colors, hiding trauma, poverty, and the pain of racism and immigration. Both my parents were young children when their families left everything behind and emigrated to Israel, my father from Iran and my mother from Syria. Both grew up with six siblings in poor neighborhoods and struggled not only with poverty but also with the prejudice that came with being from an ethnic group considered inferior in Israel in the 1950s. I knew that my father had two sisters who got sick and died when they were toddlers, before he was born, and that as a baby he was very ill himself and almost didn’t survive. His father, my grandfather, who was blind from birth, needed my father to go to work with him, to sell newspapers on the street. As a child I was aware that my father hadn’t gone to school and had worked to support his family since he was seven years old. He taught me how to work hard, as he longed for me to get an education that he could never afford for himself. Like my father, my mother had also struggled as a baby with life-threatening illness. She had lost her oldest brother when she was ten years old, an enormous trauma for the whole family. My mother didn’t have many childhood memories and therefore those are unknown to me. I’m not sure my parents ever realized how similar their histories were, how their bond was silently tied with illness, poverty, early loss, and shame. Like many other families, our family colluded and shared the unspoken understanding that silence was the best way to erase what was unpleasant. The assumption in those days was that what you don’t remember won’t hurt you. But what if what you don’t remember is in fact remembered, in spite of your best efforts? I was their first child, and their traumatic past lived in my body. There were wars where I grew up, and so often we, the kids, felt frightened, not fully aware that we were being raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and that violence, loss, and endless grief were our national heritage. The Yom Kippur War, by then the fifth war since 1948, broke out when I was only two years old. My sister was born on the first day of that war. Like all the other men, my father was called to serve in the army. I was left with a neighbor while my mother went alone to the hospital to give birth to my sister.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “This was the most emotional my mother had ever seen him, before or after,” Rachel tells me. “He was a pretty steady, rational guy. She almost never saw him cry. She told me that when she was sad as a little girl, her father would pick her up and hug her until she could hardly breathe. Then he would look at her and ask, ‘Are you feeling better now?’ And when she nodded, he would set her back down and, without looking at each other, they would each go to their rooms. They never talked about emotions, and my mother didn’t know anything about his past. She only knew that he came from ‘there’ and that his whole family had been murdered at Auschwitz. She didn’t know how he had managed to be the only one who survived, and none of us dared to ask.” The past, Rachel and I now realize, was required to be forgotten. After that fight, her parents gave up. They named their baby Rachel. In the Bible, Rachel was the love of Jacob’s life, and Rachel’s parents knew she would be the love of theirs. Rachel’s grandparents died when she was young. Years later, when her mother suggested the name Ruth for their newborn, Rachel and Marc immediately loved it. “I want my baby to be connected to our family history. I want her to know who we are,” Rachel tells me. “I researched and found that Ruth was a popular name in Hungary in the 1930s. I’m sure my grandparents didn’t want to be reminded of that, but as the next generation, I want not only to face the past but also to cherish it.” Her face lightens as she looks at Ruth, who is sound asleep. At this point Rachel and Marc begin exploring the possibility of moving with Ruth to Israel. “I’m going to fulfill my childhood dream,” Rachel tells me with a smile. “I feel so lucky that Marc can get a job there. Did I tell you that he has family there? I grew up with very few relatives around. My grandmother was an only child; she had an aunt who she was not in touch with. And there was no one on my father’s side. But in Jerusalem we had one family friend, a man who had survived the Holocaust with my grandfather and who was like a brother to him. After the war my grandfather immigrated to America, and his friend went to Israel. We used to visit him during the summers, and I remember his daughter and his granddaughter, who was more or less my age. I’m sure he has died by now, but I wonder if his family is still in Jerusalem.” Rachel opens her phone and swipes through her pictures. She finds one from her childhood album and hands me the phone. It is a photograph of Rachel at the age of eight with another girl; they are holding hands and smiling for the camera.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We walked into our hosts’ home, with Ruth sleeping in the sling, and were invited to sit on the porch. As we sat down, Ruth woke up, and I introduced her to the family. ‘This is Ruth,’ I said, and the daughter looked at me, startled. She didn’t say a word and went to the kitchen to bring tea and cookies. When she came back, she said, ‘How meaningful that you named her Ruth. My father used to talk about Ruth. He said that your grandfather never recovered from her death. That a part of him died with her.’ “I didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I had no idea who Ruth was. That I only knew from my mother that she was a relative who had died at Auschwitz and that her name was on the memorial candle my grandparents used to light every holiday. I couldn’t breathe and instead kept silent. Marc looked at me and knew what I needed. He turned to our host and asked if she could tell us everything she knew about Ruth. “And then we discovered my grandparents’ secret. She told us that when the war started, my grandfather was married and had a daughter named Ruth. She was still a baby when they arrived at Auschwitz. His wife and daughter were separated from him and taken to the women’s section. He never saw them again. Someone told him they were taken to the gas chambers and murdered just a few hours after they’d arrived.” Rachel tells me that while they were talking, a siren sounded. Their hostess apologized for not preparing them. “What a symbolic moment,” she said. “Today is Holocaust Day. The tradition is to stand in silence in memory of the six million who were murdered.” They all stood for a long moment until the siren ended. Then the granddaughter said, “I’m sure that was strange for you; it is never easy for us either.” Her voice was tender. “I work as a teacher, and kids here tend to giggle during the siren. I remember this from my own childhood. Coming from a different country you probably understand that it’s a lot for children to handle, that it’s hard for them to process the horror.” Rachel looks at me and starts to cry. We feel the ground shift, realizing that this secret nightmare has been her way to live the memory of an unimaginable trauma. As the narrative of the past takes shape, we watch Rachel’s ghost turn into an ancestor.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She had a little smile on her face, but she wasn’t alive anymore. Eve tells me this as if she is telling me about her own dead mother. I have tears in my eyes but she doesn’t. She looks at me and takes a deep breath herself. Is she making sure she is still alive? She moves uncomfortably. “You mentioned before that my mother was twelve years old when her mother got sick, and my daughter was twelve years old when I started seeing Josh. I never made that connection. When we have sex I always cry. Once in a while I ask him to save my life, to take me somewhere, drive me far away.” “It is not unusual for sex to become a desperate attempt to heal our wounded parents and ourselves,” I say, and Eve starts to cry. “It’s so awful,” she whispers. “If mothers get sick when their daughters are twelve years old, and then they die, then of course I had to save my life,” she says. I ask if she has a memory from that age, from when she was around twelve years old. Eve looks at me, surprised. She doesn’t have many childhood memories. “How strange,” she says. “After all, my mother was the one who raised me, the one who was home with the kids, but I don’t have any real memories of times with her.” She pauses and gazes out the window. I feel that she is suddenly gone again and I wait silently for her to come back. It is in that moment that I identify the relationship between her moments of numbness, her grandmother’s death, and the impact this had on her mother. I hear myself asking, “Is your mother alive?” Eve looks startled. We both know that I would have known if her mother, Sara, had died—she would have told me—but still I asked. My question implies that her mother is in some ways dead, that she died there in that bedroom with her own mother and could never be a functional mother herself. “I suddenly remember something,” Eve says. “When you asked me just now if my mother was alive, I had the most disturbing image from my childhood. I’m not even sure how it is related. An image of a dead dog. “When I was twelve years old I found a little puppy in the street, right near our house. I petted it, and when I put it back in the street and turned to go home, the puppy followed me. I remember feeling so happy. I felt that the puppy loved me and I picked it up again and decided to take the chance and bring it home.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it. She thought that if she stayed in bed with her mother, she could keep her alive; that if she made sure she synchronized her breaths with her mother’s, they would breathe together forever. On Sara’s fourteenth birthday, her mother took seven deep breaths, each of them sounding like a sigh, and then one last breath. She had a little smile on her face, but she wasn’t alive anymore. Eve tells me this as if she is telling me about her own dead mother. I have tears in my eyes but she doesn’t. She looks at me and takes a deep breath herself. Is she making sure she is still alive? She moves uncomfortably. “You mentioned before that my mother was twelve years old when her mother got sick, and my daughter was twelve years old when I started seeing Josh. I never made that connection. When we have sex I always cry. Once in a while I ask him to save my life, to take me somewhere, drive me far away.” “It is not unusual for sex to become a desperate attempt to heal our wounded parents and ourselves,” I say, and Eve starts to cry.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I realized after a year or two that the tree had been a higher power for me when I could not accept the idea of a god. It remains a powerful symbol for me, but I now have God in my life as well. Many thoughts and quotations have kept me going over the years. This poem has become a favorite: [image file=img/page0250_0000.svg] A friend arrived in my town just after she had left the Emissaries. We spent many long hours together as she began her exit and the restoration of her life. We remain the best of friends. I know she has breathed better as a result, so by the poem's definition, I have succeeded. Anything else I do is gravy. I can sum up the positive aspects of this horrible cult experience by saying that I've had the chance to reinvent myself. Few people ever have such a thorough opportunity as those of us who have been through a cult experience. Blinded by the Lightby Rosanne Henry Rosanne Henry and her husband joined a New Age/Eastern-style cult known as Kashi Ranch. Rosanne was persuaded by the group to give her newborn child to the leader, and later Rosanne left the group. She writes about the pain of losing her daughter and the joy ofgoing back to reclaim custody of her. Rosanne is a licensed professional counselor who specializes in cult recovery. Harry and I had been married three years. Due to various confusions and tensions in our lives, we decided to try therapy. To save money, we went to the Free University and signed up with so-called art therapists (who turned out to have journalism degrees). After six months of therapy, they referred us to Joya, their new spiritual teacher. Within two weeks of the referral, Harry took emergency leave from his medical residency and flew two thousand miles to Florida to meet Joya. She was perceptive, shrewd, and charismatic. She immediately began breaking Harry down and indoctrinating him. Concerned about Harry's welfare and our marriage, I followed him to Kashi Ranch, the ashram where Joya and her followers lived. Because of the vulnerable state we were in, it took only a few months of concentrated efforts to indoctrinate us into the cult. We moved from Colorado to Florida. Harry found a job with a health maintenance organization while I began developing a business that would serve as the economic base for the Ranch. Within a year, Macho Products was in operation, manufacturing and distributing protective equipment for the martial arts. Joya, whose name was now Joyce Cho, was trying to have a child. She had recently married a Tae-Kwon-Do master, and had two grown children and a teenager from her first marriage; but at age forty, she wanted more. For months, we heard about her miscarriages and her relentless desire to get pregnant. She then devised a plan, and whoever was pregnant on the Ranch became a target.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The party went off to perfection, and a dinner invitation from Nessim threw the old diplomat into a transport of pleasure which was not feigned. It was well known that the King was a frequent guest at Nessim’s table and the old man was already writing a despatch in his mind which began with the words: ‘Dining with the King last week I brought the conversation round to the question of.… He said … I replied.…’ His lips began to move, his eyes to unfocus themselves, as he retired into one of those public trances for which he was famous, and from which he would awake with a start to astonish his interlocutors with a silly cod’s smile of apology. For my part I found it strange to revisit the little tank-like flat where I had passed nearly two years of my life; to recall that it was here, in this very room, that I had first encountered Melissa. It had undergone a great transformation at the hands of Pombal’s latest mistress. She had insisted upon its being panelled and painted off-white with a maroon skirting-board. The old arm-chairs whose stuffing used to leak slowly out of the rents in their sides had been re-upholstered in some heavy damask material with a pattern of fleur-de-lis while the three ancient sofas had been banished completely to make floor-space. No doubt they had been sold or broken up. ‘Somewhere’ I thought in quotation from a poem by the old poet, ‘somewhere those wretched old things must still be knocking about.’ How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work. Pombal’s gaunt bedroom had become vaguely fin de siécle and was as clean as a new pin. Oscar Wilde might have admitted it as a set for the first act of a play. My own room had reverted once more to a box-room, but the bed was still there standing against the wall by the iron sink. The yellow curtain had of course disappeared and had been replaced by a drab piece of white cloth. I put my hand to the rusted frame of the old bed and was stabbed to the heart by the memory of Melissa turning her candid eyes upon me in the dusky half-light of the little room. I was ashamed and surprised by my grief. And when Justine came into the room behind me I kicked the door shut and immediately began to kiss her lips and hair and forehead, squeezing her almost breathless in my arms lest she should surprise the tears in my eyes. But she knew at once, and returning my kisses with that wonderful ardour that only friendship can give to our actions, she murmured: ‘I know. I know.’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I can feel my heart beat as he continues. “She was the love of my life, but strangely, ever since she died I find myself thinking I just made her up, that she never actually existed. Do you know what I mean?” He looks at me, and I can see the tears in his eyes—and feel tears building up in my own. “Love needs a witness,” I say. “I know what you mean.” I’m thinking about Naomi and her devoted witnessing of Isabella’s life. I’m thinking of everything I know that this man doesn’t realize. I’m thinking of the major role this man played in Isabella’s life and of his painful loss. So many invisible characters, so many secrets. I decide to refer him to another therapist. He deserves his own separate treatment, and Naomi deserves my loyalty. I want to cherish her Isabella and not confuse her with the Isabella of the man I’ve just met. I am left stunned to process my own feelings, holding more secrets than ever. Is this the secret Isabella wanted to share with Naomi, or did Naomi know this and keep it as a secret from me? I may never know. I’m reminded of the enigma of the human mind, questioning whether we can ever fully know another person’s pain. 10THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCEOne snowy day, Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly, “Like you, I am not used to this weather.” I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an explanation. “I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues, almost whispering. We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different languages—one innocent, the other dangerous. “So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?” That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.” He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows. “It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me. Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation in Italy.”

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  All I could think was that I needed to leave the Mission, the Swami, and my friends-again. I needed room to think. I had to leave, had to separate myself. It was hot in New York City on August 13, 1988, the day I finally made my decision to leave the Swami. At age thirty-three, I was confronted with the reality that I was without a career, financial stability, or a home. I was in a spiritual crisis that sent my mind, reeling. I felt a part of me die that hot summer day. The innocent part of me that I reserved for my relationship with God was crushed. As I made my decision, I knew I would lose my devotee family, just as I had lost my TM family. I made the decision. Then my recovery began. The first night away from the Mission was one of the most difficult. Involuntary, constant chanting played in my head, a reminder of where I had been. Thoughts of the Swami, God, Hell, and my mortality rushed through my head. It took months for these thoughts to pass. I constantly questioned myself: Was I making the right choice? Am I going to have to descend into lower animal forms? Will I spend many lifetimes searching for God before I am given another chance at a human birth? Over time I began to realize that these thoughts were phobias induced by the group. I felt deeply depressed over the realization that I had lost many years devoting my energy to. the whims of gurus. I was emotionally regressed and spiritually spent, and knew I needed to get out of the quagmire of unhealthy spirituality. I wanted help, but whom could I trust? Both groups had discredited the value of therapy. Maharishi said therapy was "just stirring up the mud." The Swami taught that all problems were spiritual. I was confused about what I might gain in therapy, so I didn't seek therapy right away. Speaking with exit counselors helped me understand the persuasion techniques I had been subjected to in the two cults. In my fourteen years as a devotee, I had spent more than ten thousand hours engaged in hypnotic, trance- inducingtechniques. That leaves a legacy. The meditation practices left me with an inability to focus or concentrate. I had difficulty maintaining logical thought, reading, even carrying on a conversation. I was suffering from a dissociative disorder that had me feeling as though I wasn't in my own body. This sensation undermined my sense of self. I spaced out easily, most notably during stressful situations. To regain my self-confidence, I worked with my brother-in-law at a fairly physical job. Physical work helped me regain my ability to focus, and regular exercise helped me combat my tendency to dissociate.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But, not in the same way. I knew it never would be, I didn’t mind. The fact is, she had a man-friend, who wished to marry her. But she wouldn’t do it, she believed in the free union. Nance, she was the strongest-minded woman I ever knew!’She sounded, I thought, insufferable; but I had not missed that was. I swallowed, and Florence gazed once at me, then looked again at the fire.‘A few months after I first met her,’ she went on, ‘I began to see that she was not - quite well. One day she turned up here with a suitcase. She was to have a baby, had lost her rooms because of it, and the man - who turned out hopeless, after all - was too ashamed to take her. She had nowhere... Of course, we took her in. Ralph didn’t mind, he loved her almost as much as I did. We planned to live together, and raise the baby as our own. I was glad - I was glad! - that the man had thrown her over, that the landlady had cast her out...’She gave a grimace, then scraped with a nail at a piece of ash that had come floating from the fire and had fallen on her skirt. ‘Those were, I think, the happiest months of all my life. Having Lilian here, it was like — I cannot say what it was like. It was dazzling; I was dazzled with happiness. She changed the house - really changed it, I mean, not just its spirit. She had us strip the walls, and paint them. She made that rug.’ She nodded to the gaudy rug before the fire - the one I had thought woven, in a blither moment, by some sightless Scottish shepherd - and I quickly took my feet from it. ‘It didn’t matter that we weren’t lovers; we were so close - closer than sisters. We slept upstairs, together. We read together. She taught me things. That picture, of Eleanor Marx’ - she nodded to the little photograph — ‘that was hers. Eleanor Marx was her great heroine, I used to say she favoured her; I don’t have a photograph of Lily. That book, of Whitman‘s, that was hers too. The passage you read out, it always makes me think of me and her. She said that we were comrades - if women may be comrades.’ Her lips had grown dry, and she passed her tongue across them. ‘If women may be comrades,’ she said again, ‘I was hers...’She grew silent.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She went through radiation treatment and chemotherapy and was in a short remission, and then the cancer came back. She suffered through more rounds of chemo but only became sicker and sicker. Sara was fourteen years old when her mother died. “My mother, like me, was the oldest of four children and the only girl. She was her mother’s main caretaker and a responsible and devoted daughter. She told me that for months her mother would lie in bed all day with a high fever, and she would try to help, bringing her ice and wet towels to control the fever. But nothing worked. As time passed the fevers started earlier in the day and lasted all night. My grandfather moved to sleep in the living room; my mother would wake up in the middle of the night to check on her mother and would run home after school to see if she needed anything. “In the last few weeks her mother hardly opened her eyes. When she did, it seemed like she was staring into space, not really able to see anything. My mother wasn’t sure if her mother even knew she was lying next to her anymore. Her skin became yellow and her mouth was a little open all the time, as if she couldn’t hold it closed. As toxins from the liver went into her brain she became confused and once in a while whispered something that didn’t make any sense, for instance, that they needed to feed the dogs, but they never had dogs. My mother wondered if she was referring to a dog she’d had as a child, but she never knew if that dog existed. “I don’t think she ever got over her mother’s death,” Eve says. “She told me about the last days of her mother’s life many times, as if telling me would help her process it better or as if she needed me to know every detail so she wouldn’t feel so alone.” In the last few days of her mother’s life, Sara didn’t go to school. She would crawl into bed with her mother and try to listen to her breathing. It comforted her to know that her mother was still alive, that her mother could hear her. But Sara knew she couldn’t touch her mother anymore; her body had become so sensitive, even a gentle touch could hurt her. A nurse from the hospital came to visit their house every day, and one day she called Sara to the other room and told her that her mother was going to die soon, in weeks or maybe days. She gave her a little green book that described what to expect. But Sara didn’t really believe it.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  A couple of months later she was dead.” I can feel my heart beat as he continues. “She was the love of my life, but strangely, ever since she died I find myself thinking I just made her up, that she never actually existed. Do you know what I mean?” He looks at me, and I can see the tears in his eyes—and feel tears building up in my own. “Love needs a witness,” I say. “I know what you mean.” I’m thinking about Naomi and her devoted witnessing of Isabella’s life. I’m thinking of everything I know that this man doesn’t realize. I’m thinking of the major role this man played in Isabella’s life and of his painful loss. So many invisible characters, so many secrets. I decide to refer him to another therapist. He deserves his own separate treatment, and Naomi deserves my loyalty. I want to cherish her Isabella and not confuse her with the Isabella of the man I’ve just met. I am left stunned to process my own feelings, holding more secrets than ever. Is this the secret Isabella wanted to share with Naomi, or did Naomi know this and keep it as a secret from me? I may never know. I’m reminded of the enigma of the human mind, questioning whether we can ever fully know another person’s pain. 10 THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE ONE SNOWY DAY, Guy, a man in his mid-forties, walks into my office for the first time. Wearing a heavy gray coat, he nods and says softly, “Like you, I am not used to this weather.” I am not sure exactly what he is referring to, and I wait for an explanation. “I was born in the same city you were born in,” he continues, almost whispering. We switch to speaking our mother tongue, Hebrew, but very quickly I come to understand that we are speaking different languages—one innocent, the other dangerous. “So,” Guy says slowly, as he tries to find a comfortable position in the armchair. “How come you chose to become a psychoanalyst when no one else in your family is in the mental health profession?” That is strange, I think to myself. How does he know no one in my family is a therapist? And if he doesn’t know, why would he make those assumptions? But I don’t have to speculate long, as Guy goes on: “Your sister, she is an architect, and her kids seem pretty sweet.” He doesn’t assume, I realize with fright. He knows. “It looks like you know a thing or two about me,” I say, inviting him to clarify, maybe to confess that indeed we met many years ago in Tel Aviv, or that we have mutual friends who referred him to me. Guy smiles. “I’m sure I know more about you than you want me to know,” he says. He pauses and then adds, “I hope you enjoyed your summer vacation in Italy.” How does he know that?

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We tend to assume that what we can see must be known to us, but in fact, so much of what we don’t know about ourselves lies in the familiar, sometimes even in the obvious. Often we realize that it is in fact right before our eyes, and still we can’t see it. When I meet my patient Dana for the first time, I don’t know that her family traumas touch my own. My family trauma is unveiled and brought to life in the space between us. One ghost awakens another, and without awareness that brings us to new places. My mother’s older brother drowned in the sea when he was fourteen years old and she was only ten. In our family this was not a secret, but it was something we never talked about. We all knew that my mother was unable to speak about that part of her childhood. We understood that for her, remembering was a form of living through something that she couldn’t live through. The ten-year-old girl that she was had broken into pieces and never recovered. A part of her was gone with him, and only a picture in my grandparents’ living room hung as a reminder that many years ago, something was different. We, her children, were vigilant, trying never to touch what was clearly an open wound, and what became a sensitive spot for all of us. Once in a while, when someone whistled on the street, we all stopped breathing, waiting for my mother to briefly sigh, “My brother Eli,” her voice turning into that of a little girl. “He knew how to whistle, and his were absolutely the loudest.” Then she would pause for a moment and change the subject. In our attempt to protect the people we love from pain, we manage to keep those memories, stories, and facts forgotten, dissociated, hidden in our own minds. We know, and still we do not remember. Our unconscious minds are always loyal to our loved ones and to the unspeakable fact within their souls. So, while something familiar lives inside us, we treat it as a stranger within. Of course I knew that my mother had lost her brother. Of course I remembered every detail that I had ever learned. At the same time, I didn’t know and never remembered. That part of my mother’s childhood lived inside me in an isolated capsule, unintegrated with everything else, and when my patient Dana enters my office for the first time and tells me about her dead brother, I look at her tears and don’t remember, don’t realize in that moment, that she is my own mother who fell apart. I just know I can’t breathe. Dana tells me she wants to start therapy. “But it’s not about my dead brother. I’m just too emotional and I need to learn how to control my emotions,” she says.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  We were all urged to give our babies to "Ma" (Joyce's spiritual name). We were told that these children would eventually be Ma's successors. All this was handled discreetly through "the girls," a group of women who took personal care of Joyce and handled her dirty work. When I was six months pregnant with our first child, I was targeted. The girls worked on Harryfirst and had him work on me. After two months of hell, I finally agreed to their plan. I remember the precise moment when the switch flipped: "There is nothing greater that I could do for my child than give her to the divine mother." Four of us gave our first child to this woman. She raised them as twins, like two matched sets of dolls. Joyce assured me that I would be significantly involved in my daughter's care. As it turned out, I got to watch all the children sleep a few hours a night, four nights a week. Near the end of the first year, I was thrown out of the nursery after an argument with Joyce's tyrannical teenage daughter. Shortly after that, I left Kashi Ranch and joined Harry, who had left five months earlier. I did not take my daughter with me, though I desperately wanted to. I had begun to see a rather dark side of Joyce, but I couldn't give her up: she was still my guru, my god. I had to truly believe this to leave my daughter with her. Harry and I moved back to Colorado and started a new life. Six months later, I got pregnant. When I gave birth to our first son, I learned how it felt to actually keep my own child. It was such a healing experience to love and nurture my son, yet it was so disturbing to think about my daughter. How could I have done this? Two years passed; trying desperately to replace my daughter, I became pregnant with our second son. For years I endured the deepest grief known to a woman: a longing for her child. Finally, I got up the courage to visit the Ranch to see my daughter. My little girl, Ganga, was six years old on my first trip back. She was so beautiful and full of life, and we connected right away, but I had to be careful because she thought Ma was her mother. Seeing her was both relief and torture. I wanted her back in my life, but I didn't want to move back to the Ranch and surrender to Ma again. For four months, Joyce and her cohorts worked on Harry and me to move back there. Finally, I hit my,limit; something snapped. I was breaking through the cult mind-set: I didn't have to accept Joyce's reality anymore. But what in hell was I going to do about Ganga? . I knew that I desperately needed good professional help.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved...I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away.‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away.‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door.But before she could reach it, I called her name.I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’‘You are!’

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  For a few weeks that woman cooked every day,” she says. “She packed all the meals in boxes, and labeled them with dates, and stored them in a big freezer.” Naomi takes a deep breath. “Isabella said she regretted that she was never a good cook. ‘Can you believe I might force them to eat my cooking for years?’ she joked, and I pretended it was funny.” They laughed together, and Isabella shared with Naomi her idea of leaving something for the children, letters and gifts for important events she would miss. They both knew that like that mother she read about, Isabella couldn’t imagine separating from her children. Naomi doesn’t look at me. “Many people recover from cancer and she could be one of them,” she says. I realize that she is trying to calm herself, to make sense of everything, to feel less helpless. She continues. “‘Don’t think about it,’ I told Isabella. ‘You are about to start a new experimental treatment. There is still hope.’ I held her hand as tightly as I could. ‘Isy, you are a fighter. It’s not over,’ I said. “Isabella didn’t answer. I could see that she was irritated, but she kept silent and just handed me four big blue boxes. She asked me to go over her directions, to make sure I understood what to do with them. “‘Open on your eighth birthday,’ she wrote to her daughter on a big square envelope. On another, ‘Open on the first day of school.’ “There were good luck notes, gifts, and letters for birthdays and graduations. She left each of the girls a book on puberty, the same book she and I used to read together when we were twelve years old. It was so painful that at some point I stopped and couldn’t go on. ‘Isy, why?’ I wanted to ask, but she was determined and I knew that I should do what she wanted me to do; that if she could handle it I should be able to handle it too.” Naomi and I sit in silence. There is no real way to escape the pain, and words cannot capture it. “Before I left her house Isabella seemed restless. I felt like she was trying to tell me something but couldn’t, and I have to admit, I’m not sure I wanted to know. It was already a lot.” Naomi shakes her head. “I feel like such a bad friend,” she says. “Isabella needed me to imagine with her how it feels to say goodbye to her children and know that she will never see them again. She needed me to know that they will need her and that she won’t be there for them. And I just couldn’t. I wish I could put my selfish pain aside and help her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The only faces I saw were those of Mrs Best, and Mary - the little skivvy who had opened the door to me, who changed my pot and brought me coal and water, and who I sometimes sent on errands to buy me cigarettes and food. Her expression as she handed me my packages showed me how strange I had become; but to her fear and her wonder alike, I was indifferent. I was indifferent to everything except my own grief - and this I indulged with a strange and horrible passion. I believe I barely washed in all those weeks - and certainly I did not change my dress, for I had no other. Very early on I gave off wearing my false chignon, too, and let my hair straggle greasily about my ears. I smoked, endlessly - my fingers grew brown, from the nail to the knuckle; but I ate hardly at all. For all that I liked to watch the carcases being towed about at Smithfield, the thought of meat upon my tongue made me nauseous, and I had stomach for none but the blandest of foods. Like a woman quickening with child I developed a curious appetite: I longed only for sweet, white bread. I gave Mary shilling after shilling, and sent her to Camden Town and Whitechapel, Limehouse and Soho, for bagels, brioches and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries. These I would eat dipped in mugs of tea, which I brewed, ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk. It was the drink I had used to make for Kitty, in our first days together at the Canterbury Palace. The taste of it was like the taste of her; and a comfort, and a frightful torment, all at once. The weeks, for all my carelessness to their passing, passed by anyway. There is little to say about them, except that they were dreadful. The tenant in the room above my own moved out, and was replaced by a poor couple with a baby: the baby was colicky, and cried in the night. Mrs Best’s son found a sweetheart, and brought her to the house: she was given tea and sandwiches in the downstairs parlour; she sang songs, while someone played on the piano. Mary broke a window with a broom, and shrieked - then shrieked again when Mrs Best rolled up her sleeve and slapped her. Such were the sounds I caught, in my grim chamber. They might have solaced me, except that I was beyond solace. They only kept me mindful of the things - all the ordinary things! the smack of a kiss, the lilt of a voice lifted in pleasure or anger - that I had left behind me.